


All the Moons between

by theplotholesmademedoit



Series: How I Wish You Could Tell [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, I debated rating it M, I'm Bad At Tagging, Jim and Spock our cute, M/M, More angst, Sexual Humor, bond, but here goes, married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theplotholesmademedoit/pseuds/theplotholesmademedoit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been along time since Winona's hugged her youngest son. It's been even longer since she let him know she wanted to. But after six years apart, Jim, with Spock in tow, comes to visit Riverside. With some of her stickier memories and a lesson from Spock, she just might make amends.</p><p>Companion piece to "Things the Crickets Know". Can stand alone</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello Humans and other intelligent life forms.
> 
> So this is mostly Winona angsting and Jim and Spock being adorable. All in all a better combo than it sounds. Like salt and caramel. 
> 
> Damn now I'm hungry.
> 
> It was actually a lot of fun to write, and my hopes are that it's just as much fun to read. Enjoy!
> 
> (unbetad, if you see a mistake I'd be grateful if you pointed it out!)

 

On the first night the hover cab skids silently on air as it stops in front of the old barn house.

Winona leaves the porch lights on so the gravel drive way is washed white, pebbles crumbling into black the further down the road they get. The inside of the house stays dark to let her press her face on the glass, a watching ghost, until she can move her feet to meet them at the steps.

Her breathes speeds as they approach, fogging the window. She cleans it with a squeak of a licked bathrobe sleeve in time to see her son shake himself awake and hand the cab driver a fist full of credits.

There’s a happiness she doesn’t think she’s seen in him before as he bends down to something in his lap. A second later, a black head pops into her vision, the Vulcan ( _her son-in-law,_ she thinks with a swoop of her stomach) composed and straight backed even when yanked from sleep. Except he’s not composed because he smiles at a disheveled Jim, actually smiles, closed lips drawing up in a neat but unmistakably warm line, then leaning forwards to meet Jim’s.

It’s a quick, but the practice intimacy in the slide of their mouths and the blinding grin Jim gives as he pulls away burns her in places she thought were ashen long ago, for reasons she’s been trying not to think about for longer. Then Jim, her youngest, her _Jimmy_ , who she knows was never really hers at all, who she hasn’t seen in six years, who saved the world two times over looks up at the his childhood home.

His face falls, his eyes dim.

She wants to cry.

Spock sees him dampen too; the black slashes of his eyebrows lowering so there’s a dip in skin between them. He says something she can’t hear from all the walls she’s placed between them and puts a hand on Jim’s shoulder. Jim manages a weak smile and Spock kisses his temple before the door clangs open and they step out. Even she catches the crunch of the gravel, like flecks of bones beneath their feet, cutting into the hum of the crickets as they get their luggage.

She does go to greet them eventually. The hug she shares with Jim and “I missed you” whispered in his ear are stiffer than the joints in her figures that spent too many years bent around a PADD and not enough rubbing over the warmth of her son’s back.

Spock hovers, a polite shadow. He somehow looks ready to step between them while keeping his hands clasped behind his back and his expression a neutral mask.

Later, on the first night, she tiptoes around the louder floorboards to Jim’s old bedroom, leaning an ear against the door where slices of paint are missing from the places “Do Not Enter” posters use to stick.

She’s not sure how long she stands there, listening to the sway of their breath, the occasional twist of blankets and what sounds suspiciously like purring. But it’s long enough to hear Jim make a sound strangled somewhere between a sob and a scream.

It’s a sound so like the one she heard when she had come home early from a mission to find a teenage Jim beaten to smears of black and purple. She didn’t know until years later that it was at the hands of the man she married to care for him.

It’s a sound so, so, like the one Jim had made when she tried to touch him after Tarsus.

The sound becomes hard gasps, quickly followed by murmurs in Vulcan, and deep hushed tones that dip in out of music like half a lullaby. She catches snippets, "ashaya" and "k'hat'n'dlawa, you are safe" that slip smoothly over her son's cries. Eventually, they quite again.

Winona leaves, walking back to her room with bloody palms where her nails split the creases.

She doesn’t sleep that night.

…*....

On the second night she talks to Spock. No amount of sheep counted will help her now. They jump over the fence, one, two, three, then the fourth sheep turns back at her, with Fanks sweaty face. “Little bastard ran away, just like his brother” he says, “Good riddance.”

She sees the Vulcan sitting on the porch through the bedroom window, and she’s not sure why she goes down. Maybe it’s to hear _something_ of all those years of Jim’s life she’s missed. Maybe it’s because she wants to know the man who can make her son smile like that, the way he did on the first night in the cab, the way he did in the photo of their bonding ceremony that had appeared in her inbox two years ago. Maybe she needs to find out why he stiffens when she gets within a foot of Jim.

Maybe she’s trying to torture herself.

Whatever the reason, she goes.

            The orange porch lights make a carnival with the night stain of blue shadows and white strips of moon already in Spock's hair. He seems to see everything she doesn’t want him too.

            She ask him why he doesn’t like her.

            Then listens.

            He calmly tell her that no- he doesn’t not like her, he resents her. Resents her because he loves Jim, fiercely and absolutely, but her son, “his T’hy’la” he calls him struggles to believe that since so many things, so many people convinced him he shouldn’t. Because of her.

            Because of her.

 It’s been there, she always knew but

But she’s a rush, a whirl, and sandstorm, a plain old mess inside when it hits her. All the mistakes crawl fast from their buried places, they gag in her lungs, run in her eyes.

 It ‘s been along time since she’s cried like that. But Spock folds a hand over her knee and it’s hot and she starts to breath again.

She’s ready, that night.

…*....

It’s not the third night, but the third morning when she stands on the top step of the stairs, a ghost again. Only, she feels less dead this time, the tight curls of yarn on the carpet are warm as she grinds her heels against them. The sunlight makes diamond shaped stripes on the wall, on the peach puffs of her cheeks, on the canvas pockets of her button down.

She use to imagine sunbeams where golden spear-heads, stabbing at the darker things within her. They would make them bleed so when she found her reflection bent around brass doorknobs or sliver pots she’d have to look away and wish for rain.

She still thinks she’s right, but on the third morning she realizes how much she missed knowing her blood still rushed.

As she stands on the top step, hair yellow in the sun, she watches Jim and Spock in the kitchen. Spock is leaning, very straightly of course, back on the counter top by the sink, a mug of tea cupped in his long fingers. It’s made of a grey clay coiled around itself, with vein like blue splotches spiraled along its smooth ridges. An Andorian monarch had given it her many years ago and it hadn’t been doing much more than steadily gathering dust since. Until now.

Jim stirs a third spoonful of sugar in his coffee lazily, humming as the spoon clinks on the round china walls of his mug, where black letters read “Riverside Elementary Chess Champion”. He turns, lifting it in the air and jerking his hips to imaginary music as he approaches Spock.

Spock stops jiggling his tea bag in favor raising and eyebrow at him. Jim only grins broader and even more dopily than he was, tapping his coffee to Spock’s tea, than bringing it to his lips.

His eyes flutter shut and he leans in, hand not on his drink resting between Spock’s torso and wrist on the counter, their hips touching lightly. Jim shuffles so his chest is against the Vulcans and his cheek is smoothed into the groove below his ear.

Spock fails miserably at not smiling.

“Jim, you are aware coffee is not sufficient sustenance to your speed the funtions of your metabolism or provide enough caloric intake to maintain a healthy energy level?”

“Mmmmhhhh,” Jim mumbles into skin tweaked an almost green, tilting his head up so his lips cup the shell of a pointed ear, “I can think of something that will provide plenty of calories. It’s a liquid too. A thick one though, I got a bit already in the shower this morning, but I think if I get another serving the sustenance will be more than _sufficient._ ”

Spock shivers almost unnoticeable, but he remains composed.

“I am not sure whether to be appalled by your attempts at sexual humor and your absurd belief in the nutritional properties of my semen or to be aroused by your ever persistent libido.”

“Second one” Jim says as he nips the tip of the pointed ear, “definitely.”

Winona is both touched and mortified at this point. Mostly mortified. She’s lifted the tip of her slipper in a start at a walk to make her self known, if only to prevent listening to anymore details of her son’s sex-life when Spock darts an arm backwards and expertly takes a muffin from the tray behind them without so much as looking at it.

“At the present moment I am inclined to find the former more appropriate,” He thrust the muffin carefully into Jim’s hand, daring him to challenge with a sideways twitch of his jaw.

“You’re no fun Spock,” Jim huffs but Winona can hear the smile in his voice as he peels a chunk of the breaded top off and snaps a bite of it.

“I believe you expressed a very different opinion in the shower only 50.3 minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well I’ve changed my mind.”

“I shall endeavor to convince you otherwise.”

Spock's left hand is inching to a cluster of bananas a foot to the side while his right makes a slow spider crawl down Jim’s spine. When his left pinkie brushes a blunt brown tip of a banana and his right index gets _very_ close to the end of Jim’s back Winona knows she should stop hiding.

Spock will have to persuade him to eat the banana, and she would prefer to never know his methods.

The scene she witnessed was light and fuzzed with happiness, but when she takes the first step down stairs she’s oh so heavy again.

            Her feet don't really leave the floor as she enters the kitchen. The soles of her slippers are worn and flat, so she lets herself glide along the ground. Maybe she's safer if she pretends she's flying. She was always flying when she ran and this way-

            No. She’s not running now.

She tells herself to let fear go, but as Jim's blue eyes, just like his fathers, meet hers, her pulse squeezes fast from her chest to her fingers to her head.

"Hi, mom."

She clears her throat, threads a dry lip under her tongue.

"I'm proud of you Jimmy. I always was."

Jim's wrist brushes Spock's knuckles as he puts the coffee and muffin down on the counter. He swallows.

She sees his Adam’s apple bob once in his neck, the curved point of thin bone dragging down then up again. He comes to the spot where she's anchored herself, feet frozen in black tile that looks like a spread of crushed stars.

He hugs her. Warm. Soft. She hugs him back.

It's easier than she thought it would be.

"I know."

…*....

            Soon, she stops numbering nights.


	2. Important note to the readers who are fantastic enough to indulge my writing fancy

So hello lovely readers :) This is another author's note, sorry. I was just wondering if anyone would be interested in me continuing this series with a slightly less angsty oneshot in which Jim talks to Sarek. I'm working on a few other things right now, but if I get any curious kittens I'll write that too.

Also I'm on a hunt for a beta. Some one as Dyslexic as I am really should not be writing without one. I will give you the part of my soul that I haven't soled yet and gift you with drabbles of your choosing :) 

Much love,   
Sophia

**Author's Note:**

> Hi it's me again. You lot are lucky I'm not in the mood to ramble or I'd probably find some way to attempt bathroom humor and if you experienced any sort of positive emotional reaction to this fic you'd be too busy thinking about the browner and squishier substances in your toilet to remember it. 
> 
> Anyways.
> 
> I love you just for reading, but if you review or give kudos, especially if you review, my dog will love you too. Granted, he's a golden retriever and loves anything that scratches his ears of half a second, but the sentiment's the same. Thanks for reading!
> 
> Also be sure to check out the companion piece if you haven't and for all the TOS fans out there, I have a few fics coming up, so keep a look out if you're interested *shameless self advertising*
> 
> -Sophia


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